According to Google's definition of Quality Score, the following variables influence its value:

• the keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google
• the keyword's historical performance on Google
• the relevance of your ad text
• the quality of your ad's landing page

The value of the Quality Score is important because it determines the minimun bid (per click) for a keyword to display an ad on Google. You don't have much control over the a keyword's clickthrough rate or historical performance on Google, but you do have direct control over the quality and relevance of your own landing page. It's therefore in any advertiser's interest to spend some time evaluating and improving the quality of landing pages for their Google adwords.

Google does not elaborate on the details of the recent changes to the Quality Score, but some quality guidelines are provided in the Google Adwords Help Center. As you might expect, the most important thing to consider when evaluating your ad's landing page is its content. Google is concerned with landing page content because they wish to ensure that their users have good experiences when they click on Google ads. A good user experience simply means that the user quickly finds what they expected when they clicked on the ad. Here are a few points to consider when creating the landing page for a Google ad:

• Link directly to the page on your web site that is most relevant to the keywords used to trigger the ad. Do not link directly to your home page or any other page that would require the user to navigate further to find what they were looking for. For example, if you sell home electronics online and purchase a Google ad that appears for the search term "digital cameras", then have the ad link directly to the digital cameras section of your web site instead of your home page. This allows the user to immediately begin browsing through your digital camera offerings instead of navigating your site's menu system or site map to find the products they are interested in.

• Provide unique content on your web page. Having duplicate content on your web site will not only be problematic for your Google Adwords Quality Score, but will potentially wreak havoc on your web site's organic ranking as well. For tips on how to avoid duplicate content issues, read this MarketPosition.com article.

• Do not create web pages that violate the search engines' terms of service. Hiding textual content, spamming keywords, redirects, and other such activities will certainly earn your page a low Quality Score.
  

To help ensure that your landing page contains relevant content, it's a good idea to optimize the page for the keyword that triggers the ad. Optimization of pages on your site will not only improve the Quality Score for Google Adwords, but improve the overall visibility of your web site on all search engines.

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